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cnet browser review

For whatever reason, I have been more interested in alternative browsers in the last 6 months. Before that, nobody could convince me that I needed anything but Internet Explorer. I’d use the others for testing to make sure there weren’t blatent errors, but IE was all I needed. Now, my taskbar has so many browsers in it, and I’m using an alternative browser (Mozilla) for my main surfing all the time!

4 of the alternatives to IE are talked about in this CNet article: Alternative browsers - Software Reviews - CNET.com. Obviously, I can’t test out Safari, since its only for Macs, but the other 3 are viable options. Of course, the Mozilla they evaluated is 1.0, and there have been several things added to 1.2 that make it better than 1.0. I’ll probably test out Opera 7, just because its good to have Opera to test things in (I have 6 right now, but the free (with ads) version).

I’ve never big huge on Netscape, as 4.7x is crap, and 6 really wasn’t that much better. But 7 isn’t so bad.

Noticably absent from the list is the Avant Browser. It might be new, but its a great option. If you are wanting to try out a browser with tabs, but like IE, Avant is a good option for this because it has tabs, but its built on the IE rendering engine instead of Netscape and Mozilla. Its got popup blocking too

E’s favorite right now is Phoenix, because its super fast. So that would be another option I’d add to the list

So there ya go. One little article made me share a whole pile of links!!

Comments

Great article. I did testing myself with IE and NS versions but never went further. I really like NS7 (yeah everything after 4.7 was crap) and the tabbed windows are great! But now I see Avant Browser so looks like I might have a new favorite. ;)

I’m using Safari a lot more than I thought I would once I got my Power Book. It’s very nice, albeit a bit quirky. For some reason, it’s displaying the links in your Valentine’s Day skin a bit strangely... I’ll try to get a screen capture, if you’d like, so you can see how the skin renders. Otherwise, everything looks, downloads, etc. great in Safari... if it had tabs a few other browser comforts, I’d be permanently hooked.

IE has caused all kinds of a mess amongst the other browsers because everyone uses it, and everyone uses it because it’s a default browser. There’s all kinds of code that only works in IE, and thus a lot of pages don’t work in, say, Mozilla. All in all, IE is an awful browser: it’s slow, it’s resource-heavy, it crashes other apps.

Mozilla/Phoenix: Tried it on Linux, wasn’t happy with it - the rendering engine was kind of lax, and I didn’t try it again until Phoenix (which is Mozilla based.) Didn’t like it again, for several reasons: 1., it’s fast but gets caught up on Javascript for me for some reason. 2., it renders many tables inaccurately, because it’s not fully compliant. (for instance, many skins at amanita.net don’t display properly in Phoenix but do in every other browser).

O7: A HUGE improvement over Opera 6. This is a browser worth paying for. It’s fully HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS compliant, its Javascript works right now, and it’s got all the browser comforts you’d want. AND... it’s STILL the fastest browser on earth. I love it, and I won’t use anything else.